Though many see the church as a place of healing and sanctuary, the truth is far more complex. Truth be told, often times, the church is the worst place for women to go to seek support when they have been sexually assaulted – and many, many women are working hard to change this. The Rev. Dr. Leslie D. Callahan will be reflecting on this very reality as we begin the second week of Women’s History Month, and we know you’ll find her reflection insightful. Read, comment, and share.
Rev. Dr. Linda E. Thomas – Professor of Theology and Anthropology, Chair of LSTC’s Diversity Committee, Editor – “We Talk. We Listen.”
We were in a circle when we told our stories. It was an impromptu gathering of women, most of us clergy. Earlier we had all participated either as performers or audience during an evening of spoken word and music. And we were filled both from the poetry and from dinner. Into the wee hours, we told our stories. Woman after woman. Violation after violation. Stories of assault by next door neighbors and cousins, in our own homes and on public transportation. Experiences of broken bodies and broken trust. And as the stories poured out, I felt despair.
The sense of despair startled me. I was a new pastor then, energized by a greater sense of hope and possibility than I had ever known before. Anything and everything seemed possible. An established Baptist church had taken the leap and done something different: they elected a single woman to head their 120-year-old church. They were receptive to my leadership.
The world was changing. But not fast enough.
Not fast enough to heal the brokenness in the eyes of my sisters.
Not fast enough to restore the sense of safety a girl in my own church had lost when she was molested in our basement.
What shook me that evening was the sense that We cannot keep our daughters safe.
I recognized just how ineffective the church is, how disconnected from the substantial need of the women who make up the bulk of our congregations and who live with the aftermath of violation.
Tarana Burke began the #MeToo movement to turn the realization of the ubiquity of sexual violence against Black girls and women from a source of despair to an opportunity for camaraderie and change. Rather than taking the fact that so many women can say “me too” as a sign of the intractability of the problem of harassment and assault, Burke understood a decade ago what women around the nation are coming to clarity about now, that there is healing and power in bringing the truth to light in community—healing and power not only for the women who speak together but also transformative power to change the environment in which we all live.
Although the work is just beginning, there are signs that the culture is shifting to take seriously the harm that has been done. Boardrooms and studio sets will be different because of the courage women have had in telling the stories of harassment and assault.
The question is what will happen in and to the church when the reckoning comes.
Frankly, the church is overdue for its #MeToo moment. Congregations and denominations, seminaries and parachurch organizations all are implicated in the pervasiveness of sexual assault and harassment. Too often the church is the prime location for attitudes that protect perpetrators to the continual harm of their victims.
After the conviction of serial predator Dr. Larry Nasser, Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to publicly accuse him, talked in Christianity Today about the toll that standing with victims took on her relationship with her own church by noting that “church is one of the worst places to go for help.”[1] The reasons for the lack of responsiveness are many, but at the heart of the problem is a theological one, that is, the failure to regard the well-being and dignity of women and girls as central to the message of abundant life that Jesus Christ proclaimed and promised.
As a participant in the progressive side of the Black Church, I am specifically concerned that we attend to this and get it right as a feature of our understanding of justice work. Too often we have been guilty of limiting the church’s justice labor simply in terms of its advocacy for racial justice narrowly defined. This tension became obvious after the Golden Globe awards when entertainment leaders invited women who work for activist organizations to join them on the red carpet to highlight the relationship between sexual violence and economic status.
Accepting an award for lifetime achievement, Oprah Winfrey, herself a sexual assault survivor, gave an epic address that made the connection between sexual violence, economic vulnerability, and racism explicit especially by invoking the memory of Recy Taylor, who was gang raped in 1944 by six white men while walking home from church.
Especially on social media, several Black preachers decried this association as somehow diminishing the horror of what Mrs. Taylor suffered at the hands of the white men who raped her.
While all of us acknowledge that sexual harassment and sexual assault are not identical experiences—indeed that all kinds of abuse exist on a continuum—the refusal to recognize that sexual harassment is a form of abuse inhibits our capacity to proclaim a consistent justice message.
Rather than dismissing the capacity of rich white women to be abused, what we ought to proclaim is the insight of intersectionality, that is, that race and class intensify and exacerbate vulnerability to harm and violence. If privileged white women are silenced, then marginalized and poor women of color are only more so.
I fear that we have been slow to bring this to light because we know that some of our favorites will be exposed when the reckoning comes. Our churches too long have been harems for charismatic leaders. There are too many stories of revivalists being provided company for their week away from home, too many allowances for the bad behavior of great preachers. But just as the worlds of art and film have had to face that the actions of the creative perpetrators of harassment and assault are inexcusable, it’s now our turn.
We know that actors and writers and scholars and other creative women have left their fields after they have been harassed and assaulted by powerful persons in those fields.
We now need to wonder how many gifts in the church have been stifled because women have been treated as objects. How many great preachers have we lost because women whose gifts should have been nurtured were sacrificed to the great orators we had?
It’s our turn.
The conversation with my sisters years ago shaped my pastorate. It posed the question I feel compelled to answer in my preaching and pastoral care work: How do we keep our people safe? In the years since, I have heard many more stories, not just from women and girls but also from men and boys, about the injuries their bodies and minds sustained from perpetrators but also about the injuries their spirits sustained because the church would not hear them. The good news is that we can change.
Believing that the life and ministry of Jesus sealed by his resurrection portend God’s new creation, we in the church can and must prioritize the healing of those who have been harmed by sexual violence and the transformation of the world such that that violence ceases.
The beginning of the work occurs when we make room for the stories of those who say “me too,” bearing witness to the love of the God who loves us and wills for us to be healed and whole.
[1] http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/january-web-only/rachael-denhollander-larry-nassar-forgiveness-gospel.html
Reverend Dr. Leslie D. Callahan is the fifth pastor and the first woman to serve the 128-year-old St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Before being elected to the pastorate, she served on the faculties of the University of Pennsylvania and New York Theological Seminary teaching American religious history.
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As I was reading, I thought about an anecdote where I saw the church be an unsafe place. I was listening to an old, white, male preacher. He was talking about forgiveness, and he talked about an elderly woman in his congregation who based on his comments was a victim of sexual assault. He urged her to simply forgive her assailant and from time to time asked if she did. Her response was always to become angry, which he interpreted as inappropriate. He told us not to be like this woman and forgive. I hope that the church can have a better response than this preacher, and can become a safe place for women. I hope that we can feel as if our daughters are safe.
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For millennia, male violence has been used to stifle the gifts of women and girls, and you illustrate how this happens in your post very well. Sexual violence is used to break the spirit and will of women of all classes and ethnicities (and, of course, the way this violence breaks women and girls is compounded by other ways the world tries to break them based on their class, race, sexuality, etc.). I especially appreciate that you ask how many gifts the church has lost because of our willingness to sit idle while male violence hurts the female people in our congregations. How many great preachers, teachers, and pastors have we lost because of violence in our communities?
Like you, I am heartened by the #MeToo movement, but above all, I am heartened by the knowledge that this is not the life and lot that God has in mind for women and girls, and that God cries with us in our pain. Given this truth, I think we must ask ourselves how we can make sure the voices of victims of male violence are heard in our midst, and I can’t help but wonder if part of the solution must be found in better representation of female leaders in the church.
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Thank you to Dr. Leslie D. Callahan for bringing to light, once again, the need for a church’s response to sexual violence and describing how intersectionality contributes to an already vulgar reality in our world and in our churches. There are many voices lifting up the need for the church’s response. When and how are we responding?
I just finished reading a book by Rev. Dr. Monica Coleman titled The Dinah Project. I commend this book to all who are serious about providing a church’s response to sexual violence and hope that Dr. Callahan and Rev. Dr. Coleman know each other! I share this excerpt from a paper I wrote after reading Rev. Dr. Coleman’s book. You will see that sexual violence in the church and seminaries is something that still demands a response. Dr. Coleman’s book was written over 20 years ago and remains a “go to” resource for those serious about providing a church’s response to sexual violence.
Rev. Dr. Monica Coleman is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She is Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religions at Claremont School of Theology in southern California. Rev. Dr. Monica Coleman is a womanist theologian, public lecturer and author who has written many books. among them The Dinah Project. She has earned degrees from Harvard University, Vanderbilt University and Claremont Graduate University.
This well-educated, respected theologian, professor and pastor endured significant trauma as a young adult. At the age of 21, Monica A Coleman was raped by a fellow seminarian, while in her first year at divinity school. Her attempt and deep need to confide in a pastor was met with indifference, accusatory questioning and unhelpful rhetoric about casting out demons from her body. She was discouraged and disappointed by three pastors, all who fell woefully short in providing the pastoral care she needed. It took Monica six months to find a church and pastor that allowed her to express herself, share her story of rape, its effects on her life, her relationship with God and her call to ministry.
Monica’s new church home became a place for healing, compassion and safety. She continued to receive psychological counseling with the hope of being able to feel God in her life again. She sought answers from her therapist and professors to no avail. All attempts at being able to “feel God” again failed. Psychological counseling had no answers. Her professors had no answers. Monica wanted to include God in her process of healing and so she created her own ritual. This ritual grew into what is known as the Dinah Project.
The very first Dinah Project worship service, held June 1, 1997, was a community worship service that talked about sexual violence in the church. It was in and through community ritual where God was brought into the healing process. The conviction that the church has a role in the response to sexual violence was born out of Monica’s deep need for healing and a conviction that God needed to be part of her healing. This individual need and community ritual grew into a formalized, well-established, and documented ministry through Coleman’s book, The Dinah Project.
Monica Coleman’s book, The Dinah Project, is “an organized church response to the crisis of sexual violence in our communities” (16). The book is a valuable resource for churches who desire to begin a ministry that serves women (though there is an acknowledgment of men suffering from sexual violence in communities as well) who suffer from sexual violence. It provides short-term easy, cost-effective ways to address sexual violence (e.g. communications through church newsletters, provide information pamphlets, books, flyers, bring information in through local agency speakers, donate money or time to local agencies who provide support for sexual assault victims, encourage engagement in local rallies or events that address sexual violence) and is also a resource for a more considered, long-term response to sexual violence through worship, community education and counseling. Whether short-term or long-term ministries are begun, each sends a message that the church cares and is a safe place for persons who suffer from sexual violence.
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Thank you for your words! This post is a phenomenal call to action for a change in the church. These times of abuse, harassment and discrimination to women, and particularly to women of color, women in a low economic class, or transgender women, cannot be ignored by the church any longer. Not only have we lost women leaders because they have felt unsafe, but we have lost them because they are told their calls are not valid. Methods such as these must be brought to light, even in the face of resistance, lest we continue to let future generations of women be silenced in the church.
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Dr. Callahan.
First, I would like to thank you for your reflection. As a woman and a ministerial leader, your words deeply resonated with me. I am currently in seminary and have been thinking about these topics quite a lot. Your words have inspired me, and given me a great deal of motivation to speak up when I see my siblings experiencing harassment or assault, in any realm of their life, particularly that of the church or faith based settings.
I am so tired of our voices being stifled for fear of the repercussions. As ministerial leaders, we have a fine line to walk in how we deal with these types of situations. However, I am grateful for individuals like yourself who are encouraging people such as myself to use the voice we have been given to create spaces for other individuals to share their stories.
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One aspect of your piece that really stood out to me was in response to Rachel Denhollander’s comment that “church is one of the worst places to go for help.” You wrote, “the heart of the problem is a theological one,” which I think is an important reminder that religious leaders and theologians need to stay in the conversation and address these issues specifically from a faith perspective. I think your highlighting of the importance of well-being, dignity, and abundant life for women is a great start to that kind of theological response. Your reflection leaves me wondering what other theological values might serve as resources, and which might need to be reevaluated. In particular, your statement that the church might have been slow to respond so far because we fear that “some of our favorites will be exposed when the reckoning comes” is really powerful. Accountability can be painful, scary, and heartbreaking, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to work towards cultivating a church that is, as you write, safe for our daughters and for all our people.
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I echo what Bristol wrote, and want to lift up a further tactic for theological response – openly preaching and denouncing gender-based violence, and uplifting the call and value of women and gender minorities.
“that there is healing and power in bringing the truth to light in community” – spaces that are open to this are critical.
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Thank you Dr. Callahan!
When our churches cannot bear witness to the love and healing grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, then we cease being a church. To me, the “me too” movement could also be thought of the “it’s about time” movement, because this movement of awareness and awakening has been needed for a long time. I hope our churches can now reflect on their own complicity and instead be the lead for change and healing for victims of sexual harassment and violence.
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Thank you for your insight and the challenge you bring in this post. It broke my heart when I read of Rachael Denhollander saying that “church is one of the worst places to go for help.” It is indeed high time that the church has its own time of reckoning. When you mentioned that “Some of our favorites will be exposed.” I thought about how much of the mourning in the media around the #MeToo movement has been centered on mourning the loss of good reputations. We want to believe our heroes are pure and righteous because they fulfill an emotional need for us, that is just as (if not more) true with our favorite pastors/theologians/spiritual teachers. In a time when the church faces declining attendance, an already bad reputation, and all around institutional insecurity it is all the more tempting to circle the wagons and hide from scrutiny. Yet how much do we lose, and how much pain and trauma do we cause by doing so? I pray that God will give the whole church the courage to open itself to the light that shines in the darkness, exposing the deeds done there, so that we as God’s people may be born again as a place of healing and justice.
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Thank you Dr. Callahan for your words.
Your initial story concluding with the sense of inability to keep loved ones safe was a very poignant feeling that has helped me understand and frame the #metoo movement. In addition the intersectionality argument is necessary for white folks like me to remember as we change ourselves and institutions to address sexual harassment.
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Reverend Callahan, thank you for sharing this reflection and call to action. The words from this piece that stood out to me most were: “Rather than dismissing the capacity of rich white women to be abused, what we ought to proclaim is the insight of intersectionality… If privileged white women are silenced, then marginalized and poor women of color are only more so.” I think that the movement we are witnessing now, of celebrities sharing their stories of sexual trauma, has empowered women of every class and color to speak up against those who have violated and harassed them, too. To diminish the cries of the celebrities who have spoken out, or those who have spoken out against celebrities, because of the high economic status of the accuser or the accused would be a shame.
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Dr. Callahan! It is a travesty that the church today cannot be considered as a safe place for all female and male alike. Yes there are people in positions that take advantage of their current situation, then wonder why the House of God is not prospering under their watch. We as Christians as the church, nerd to address the issues that haunt our congregants and help provide means for healing, by bringing these issues to the forefront. I am an advocate for equal justice for all humanity and to see issues like this subsided that has a grip on our churches. Acts of molestations in the House of God is despicable and a slap in the face of God who provides daily the needs for justice to all peoples.
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Thank you Dr. Callahan for these insightful words. In conversation circles I am a part of as a white man there was a serious lack of care for the connections between harassment and abuse. I think you rightly called us to consider the continuum and intersectionality in white, wealthy women and those who are poc and living in a system of poverty. I also appreciated how you claimed the #metoo movement as one of solidarity to reverse a prevailing narrative of shame. I really do believe that a script has been flipped on men in positions of power who have exploited women. They are scared, nervous and know that there is real power from these women.
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The importance of this article is it calls out the church and its need to realize its own problems. It recognizes that what should be a safe place is actually a place where fears go to hide. I really appreciate that the article states how it’s about protecting people now more than ever. This is the message the Bible preaches too. For Christ came to save all not the few and elect. This is something I think that resonates deeply within my personal theology. Thank you for this wonderful post.
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This post really spoke to me. So often the church doesn’t know how to respond to instances of trauma and violence. There is this unspoken “anyone can come in an talk anytime” attitude that doesn’t really create space for the sharing of stories or invite people to bring their trauma and leave it at the cross. So much of Christ’s story is about healing and this post had me reflecting on just how the church is working to heal the spiritual wounds that people suffer daily – not just the huge injustices. Because it’s the little wounds that add up to the bigger wounds of the world. It is our turn. The cycle of silence needs to be broken and I thank you for your testimony.
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As someone seeking ordination in the ELCA, I recently had to read a document called “Vision and Expectations” that describes (among other things) how pastors are to conduct themselves in relationship to others in their communities. The document at one point expresses that pastors are to act “beyond reproach” as what they do not only can reflect badly on themselves but on the church. Sexual violence from pastors or church goers indeed casts a negative pallor on the church, which maybe be why some would rather hide these convictions instead of bring them to light. However, the church’s negligence to support victims of sexual violence and bring perpetrators to justice also casts a negative light. You are right to accuse the church, but I am also glad that you think of ways to move in a new direction. We could all do well to point our minds to change instead of keeping silent about the issue.
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Individuals should be able to trust their church community; they should feel safe. If the worst should happen, the church should always stand with the most vulnerable individuals and the victims. Unfortunately, this is too often not the case. The church often reflects a broken theology, a broken system, and a broken culture. Thank you for calling us toward healing, awareness, and action.
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“The world was changing. But not fast enough.
Not fast enough to heal the brokenness in the eyes of my sisters.”
We have been changing as a society, but more needs to take place especially in our churches. Humans are hurting, “great preachers” are given a pass, victims are still at fault. How can we keep changing this? Sharing of stories is so powerful, now to take it to the next level.
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